You Don’t Have to Optimize Every Sliver of Your Life
I am a very goal-oriented person. I love making lists of things I want to do, day-dreaming about how I’ll be different 12 months from now, jotting down a vision for where I want to be in five years. Add to that a new planner with crisp, clean pages and a pack of high quality pens, and I am one happy girl.
The only problem comes about a month later when I realize how unrealistic my goals were. The kids woke up extra early, so I didn’t write every morning like I’d hoped. A family crisis came up, so I ordered takeout instead of cooking my way through that one cookbook like I’d intended. My body decided to shut down and get sick, so I missed those workouts I’d planned to do.
Real life so often seems to get in the way of living my best life.
Maybe you can relate?
I recently listened to an episode of the The Lazy Genius podcast with Kendra Adachi. Kendra talked with author Kelly Corrigan about how not everything in your life needs to be optimized. “You don’t have to be in this constant state of self-improvement,” Kelly said.
It’s so simple, but some of us (me!) can all too easily heap goal after goal after goal on our backs until our knees buckle under the weight of our own expectations. Our overzealous desire for self-improvement leaves us worn down and discouraged months or even weeks later.
But sometimes you just get to be a person. Certain things in our lives can be what they are without optimizing them to death.
Just the other day as I was packing my kids’ lunches I thought, “I should really get more creative about what I give them.”
But why?
I assemble decently balanced meals they will (mostly) eat. Their lunches are fine. While what I feed my kids does matter to me in general, in this season, taking their school lunches to the next level really doesn’t matter. They don’t care. I don’t care. And the only reason I even thought of stepping up my lunch game was because I saw a few Instagram reels showcasing lunches that I thought, for a moment, I should aspire to make.
It’s a silly example, I know, but especially as we move into a new year, so many of us have a tendency to want to improve every single little aspect of our lives. And while self-improvement is important, maybe we don’t need to improve every area of life in every season of life.
I’ll still set goals and use my new planner. But as I do, I want to live my real life instead of constantly chasing after a version I will never attain.
If your goals and expectations can easily get out of control like mine, maybe this year, we can focus on the areas of growth that are most important to us–and then let the rest go. Maybe this year, we can take a deep breath, release what we don't need, and finally let “good enough” actually be good enough.
Cheers to a new year, friends. May it be one filled with creativity, joy, and plenty of grace along the way.
This post was adapted from a piece originally shared with the Exhale Creativity community.
